Ariel Lo spends a couple of hours most weeks sharing anime art and memes on Chinese apps, often chatting with friends in China in a Mandarin slightly different from the one she uses at home in Taiwan. “People use English on Instagram, and for Chinese apps they use Chinese phrases. If I am talking to friends in China, I would use them,” Lo said as she picked up a bubble tea at a street market in central Taichung city. The 18-year-old Earth sciences student, who creates art in her spare…
Tag: Digital media
‘The everything app’: why Elon Musk wants X to be a WeChat for the west
Daily life in Chinese cities is nearly impossible to navigate without WeChat, to the extent that being barred from the country’s super-app has been likened to a “digital death”. Commonly described as a smartphone messaging platform, it is more like several apps rolled into one, used for messaging, social media, payments, subscriptions, utility bills, food deliveries, plane and train tickets, ride hailing and much more. It is owned by the Chinese tech giant Tencent. And Elon Musk would like a rebranded Twitter to be just as indispensable in the west.…
WeChat user numbers plummet nearly 30% in Australia amid concerns of Chinese interference
WeChat has said its user numbers in Australia have declined almost 30% in the past three years, amid questions being raised about foreign interference on the app. Tencent-owned WeChat told a parliamentary committee examining foreign interference on social media that as of July 2023, the communications app favoured by Australia’s Chinese diaspora community had fewer than 500,000 daily active users in Australia. The company told the committee in 2020 that its user base was 690,000. No reason was given for the decline in user numbers in Australia in the past…
Chinese censors remove protest site Sitong Bridge from online maps
Chinese censors scrubbing the internet of any words or symbols that could be used to reference the Tiananmen Square massacre in the run-up to Sunday’s anniversary have a new target in their sights: a bridge in Beijing where a rare protest was staged last year. As the 34th anniversary of the 1989 massacre approaches, anyone searching in Chinese for Sitong Bridge on Baidu maps will draw a blank. On 13 October 2022 white banners with large red characters criticising the Chinese Communist party (CCP) were hung over the bridge near…
Australian government resists blanket WeChat ban despite restrictions by multiple departments
The Australian government is resisting issuing a ban on WeChat on government devices despite many government departments instituting their own bans after the TikTok edict earlier this month. TikTok was banned from government devices in early April over data collection and security concerns connected to the Chinese government. The move followed a review by the home affairs department which examined a range of social media platforms, but TikTok was the only app singled out for an immediate ban. At the time TikTok was banned, dozens of federal departments had already…
BBC urges staff to delete TikTok from company mobile phones
The BBC has urged its staff to delete the Chinese-own social media app TikTok from corporate mobile phones. Guidance to BBC staff circulated on Sunday said: “We don’t recommend installing TikTok on a BBC corporate device unless there is a justified business reason. If you do not need TikTok for business reasons, TikTok should be deleted.” The move comes after the UK government banned the app on government-issued phones amid fears of sensitive data being accessed by the Chinese government, owing to its ownership by the Chinese internet company ByteDance.…
TikTok unveils European data security plan amid calls for US ban
TikTok has announced a data security regime for protecting user information across Europe, as political pressure increases in the US to ban the social video app. The plan, known as Project Clover, involves user data being stored on servers in Ireland and Norway at an annual cost of €1.2bn (£1.1bn), while any data transfers outside Europe will be vetted by a third-party IT company. TikTok is under pressure in the US and Europe over its links to China via its Beijing-based parent, ByteDance. On Tuesday the White House gave its…
TikTok has been spying on reporters – exactly no one is surprised
Hello and welcome to TechScape. Alex is now off on paternity leave, and in his place a rotating cast of writers will give their takes on the world of tech. Apologies to any readers who have begged Alex for fewer stories about Elon Musk and crypto, but in a post-Twitter takeover world there are no quiet weeks for tech reporters. In the last few weeks, Musk has handed over documents for the latest edition of the “Twitter Files” to controversial author Alex Berenson (with the not-so revelatory news that Twitter…
China accused of flooding social media with spam to cover up Covid protests
An attempt to flood social media platforms with spam in order to drown out coverage of the lockdown protests in China was probably backed by the Chinese government, according to analysis by a US cybersecurity firm. Recorded Future found that networks of coordinated bot accounts were targeting non-Chinese social media platforms to crowd out genuine posts about the demonstrations with spam content and by hijacking hashtags of names of Chinese cities. It said China’s government was most likely to be behind the tactic. Charity Wright, a senior analyst at Recorded…
TechScape: What’s really behind Apple’s shift from China
This week, the first iPhone 14s rolled off Apple’s newest production line in Chennai, India. I understand why that doesn’t seem like huge news. The company has been assembling phones in India for some time, all of which serve the large domestic market. But it’s an important milestone, marking the first time Apple has produced a new iPhone outside of China in the same year it was released. It is also an important step in one of Apple’s most sensitive projects: to decouple its fortunes from those of Sino-American relations.…